21 Reactions To 'Sexist' Photo Of Girl And Boy Wearing Nurse And Doctor Scrubs

Another day, another Twitter controversy. This time, it's a photo of two toddlers, that has infuriated the internet. More specifically, their outfits. The girl can be seen walking in pink scrubs, saying "Nurse in Training" on its back while the boy's rocking a similar green outfit that reads "Doctor in Training." Medical Shots, a twitter account with 216k followers that posts health-related content, shared it on the 10th of March and as of this article it has already accumulated over 2.6k comments, 4.5k retweets, and 18k likes. Judging from the responses, however, it hit a nerve, instead of a funny bone.

A lot of male nurses and female doctors, as well as other health professionals, are pointing out that these professions don't have a gender requirement. And one person has uploaded an edited version of the image that suggests we call them what they both really are, health professionals.

But others are opposing this backlash, saying that it's making a mountain out of a molehill. "Just because men can be nurses and women can be doctors doesn't mean that every single picture needs to depict that," one commenter said. "Maybe her dream is being a nurse and his is being a doctor?" another asked.

Even though women have been entering male-dominated fields for decades, it's less common for a predominantly female occupation to have a substantial increase in its share of men. Only 13 percent of nurses in the United States are men, but that share has grown steadily since 1960, when the number was 2 percent, according to a working paper published by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. As The New York Times pointed out, the experiences of male nurses could help address a problem that's very relevant to our society: how to prepare workers for the fastest-growing jobs, at a time when more than a quarter of adult men are not in the labor force.

Yet, male nurses still make more money than their female counterparts. According to a UC San Francisco-led study, male registered nurses (RNs) make about $5,000 per year more than their female colleagues across most settings, specialty areas, and positions, and this earnings gap has not improved over the last three decades. "The roles of RNs are expanding with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and emphasis on team-based care delivery,” said lead author Ulrike Muench, Ph.D., assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences in the UCSF School of Nursing. "These results may motivate nurse employers, including physicians, to examine their pay structures and act to eliminate inequities."